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She visited her first hospital at
the age of seven, in 1916, ministering to Romanian soldiers wounded in the
First World War. Her younger brother Mircea, “the great love of my heart,”
as she called him, died that November. By December Princess Ileana, who in
the fullness of God's time would become Mother Alexandra, was on the run
from the Germans, trapped in a city with no food or fuel in the coldest
winter in fifty years. Until 1918, her life was one of hardship and
deprivation which affected her health for the rest of her life.
Even after the war ended Ileana had more than her
share of heartbreak. When she married, in 1931, her brother, King Carol II
effectively exiled her from her
Even so, Ileana made a happy and
loving home for her husband and their six children first in
With such a life of hardship and
heartbreak, it would not be surprising if Ileana had turned her back on
God. But the trials and tests she endured only strengthened her faith,
which had been confirmed at an early age. At seven, at the end of a phase
of life she described “as a far-off dream of a story I was once told,” she
woke very early one morning. In the dawn light she saw her and her
brother’s guardian angels and a group of angels surrounding her brother’s
bed. Entranced by the visitors, she approached her guardian, but he backed
away, indicating that she couldn’t touch him. The other angels laughed
with delight at her excitement, and moments later vanished. Though the
memory faded with time, it seemed to help her face the trials and
heartbreak, to use her troubles to draw closer to God.
Even her work with in the
hospitals during WWII taught her lessons in faith. Watching soldiers
suffer and die, sometimes over the course of months, she said that “there
were many . . . who gave to
me something of the vision they were granted of a new heaven and a new
earth.”
When denied permission to attend
her mother’s memorial service, Ileana thought her heart would break. To
have her King (and nephew) deny her permission to attend the memorial of
her closest friend and confidant was more than she thought she could bear.
She climbed to the chapel in the mountain where her mother’s heart lay,
and there, while gazing out at the surrounding mountains, found that “Such
things were there simply to be overcome; they were put in our way for us
to. . . mount one step higher until finally we attained the Mountain, the
true reality of living.”
It was a realization which allowed her to cling to her faith four
years later, when she was exiled from
The monastic life had always attracted Ileana – she visited
monasteries regularly in
By 1961, when her children were grown, she entered a monastery in
Sister Ileana was tonsured a full
monastic in 1967, and given the name Mother Alexandra. She returned to the
Until Mother Benedicta arrived
in1978. A fully professed monastic for over fifty years, the elder nun
brought with her the monastic tradition. The monastery grew for the next
twelve years, until there were twelve nuns crowded into the
cloister.
In 1990, God
blessed Mother Alexandra once again. The Communist regime in
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